The Lost Boys Almost Included A Different Ending

The 1980s cult classic The Lost Boys has an iconic finale and a great closing one-liner. However, there apparently was originally designed to be more to The Lost Boys after the credits rolled. While closing credits sequences are more common in movies today, they were seen far less frequently in 1987, meaning many people would have likely missed the final shots of the movie anyway, showing a mural containing lead vampire Max speaking to a group of young people in the early 1900s.

The information comes from the new book Lost in the Shadows: The Story of The Lost Boys (via IO9) by Paul Davis. Apparently, the final scene in the original script was not Grandpa's great "One thing about living in Santa Carla..." line. There was going to be another scene, which was eventually decided to movie to the end of the credits, which would have taken us back to the vampire lair, and shown us a mural painted on the wall of the cave. It showed the Santa Carla Boardwalk circa 1900, including a man in a straw hat with a big grin. The figure would clearly have been Max, the leader of the vampires, and he would have been shown talking to a group of young men. The scene was never filmed and the mural never created after The Lost Boys had its budget slashed significantly during production.

The most interesting thing about the final shot is that it's so vague it's not clear exactly what the mural is supposed to be saying. That Max was actually much older than he appeared would seem to be something that's not particularly shocking. He was a vampire after all. Was the image supposed to imply that Max was somehow not dead? It certainly could have been used to set up an eventual sequel, though that never happened (direct-to-DVD what now?). Were the men Max was talking to supposed to be Keifer Sutherland and the rest of his crew? Had they all been around for nearly a century? It seems we'll never know.

While we'll never know the answer to these questions, the questions themselves are still interesting to ask. The Lost Boys is still an incredibly popular movie today, considering how small the project originally was.

It's also interesting that the original plan for the scene was to put it post-credits. That sort of thing was an incredible rarity back then. Without the internet to spread conversation like it does today it's possible it could have been years before the knowledge of the scene even became widespread. People who owned the movie on VHS might not have even known.

It's too bad the mural was never created, as it would have been nice to at least have the image to look back on and see what was planned.